First one thing you may have missed from the US but he is really, really impopular as a person (because he is arrogant and contemptuous). So arrogant, in fact, that he didn’t even bothered to campaign—only announcing he was officially a candidate in march, not accepting any debate with the other candidates...
Secondly Mélenchon is a far left candidate but centre-left in France is already far left in the US. In many ways Mélenchon is only marginaly more extreme than François-financial markets are my ennemies-Hollande who was president in 2012-2017 (with the main difference being that Hollande’s coalition went from then centre-left Macron to Mélenchon’s little clone Hamon, while Mélenchon’s coalition is much more narrow).
Finally France’s far-right can be quite anti-capitalist and anti-free market. And in the last decades they slowly captured traditional far-left voters as the mainstream left was more focused on cultural war lite topics (France being France, the culture war is much lighter here and “socialist” is not a career destroying accusation).
Finally Macron is in fact reaping the benefits of a very conscious strategy of destroying mainstream opposition (betraying his former allies in mainstream left in 2017 and then spending 5 years picking away at the mainstream right (most notably his first Prime minister was from the mainstream right les républicains party). As a result no mainstream opposition figure was able to emerge.
I agree. In fact, you could say that Mélenchon and le Pen are closer to each other on economic and possibly foreign policy, and very far from Macron. So not unreasonable that some votes would transfer from one to the other. Huge differences on everything else of course (immigration, but also law and order, education, culture, …)
I disagree on Hollande and generally center-left. Hollande had to juggle a very broad coalition as you say. He ended up hated by everyone because his way to handle it was not finding a middle ground, but campaigning as Mélenchon lite and then attempting to govern as Macron lite. Then he tried to dump the responsibility of the turnaround to financial markets and EU. After this, any possibility of a center-left coalition with an actual center-left agenda was dead and buried...
I think the historical socialist party (PS) is in many ways closer to Mélenchon than to Macron. Don’t forget there were actual communists in Mitterrand’s coalition !
I agree on Hollande’s hesitations, but it was that Mélenchon’s lite campaign that brought him to power—and his Macron lite policy was the catalyst to the PS demise as their electors switched en masse to
Mélenchon.
On Macron.
First one thing you may have missed from the US but he is really, really impopular as a person (because he is arrogant and contemptuous). So arrogant, in fact, that he didn’t even bothered to campaign—only announcing he was officially a candidate in march, not accepting any debate with the other candidates...
Secondly Mélenchon is a far left candidate but centre-left in France is already far left in the US. In many ways Mélenchon is only marginaly more extreme than François-financial markets are my ennemies-Hollande who was president in 2012-2017 (with the main difference being that Hollande’s coalition went from then centre-left Macron to Mélenchon’s little clone Hamon, while Mélenchon’s coalition is much more narrow).
Finally France’s far-right can be quite anti-capitalist and anti-free market. And in the last decades they slowly captured traditional far-left voters as the mainstream left was more focused on cultural war lite topics (France being France, the culture war is much lighter here and “socialist” is not a career destroying accusation).
Finally Macron is in fact reaping the benefits of a very conscious strategy of destroying mainstream opposition (betraying his former allies in mainstream left in 2017 and then spending 5 years picking away at the mainstream right (most notably his first Prime minister was from the mainstream right les républicains party). As a result no mainstream opposition figure was able to emerge.
I agree. In fact, you could say that Mélenchon and le Pen are closer to each other on economic and possibly foreign policy, and very far from Macron. So not unreasonable that some votes would transfer from one to the other. Huge differences on everything else of course (immigration, but also law and order, education, culture, …) I disagree on Hollande and generally center-left. Hollande had to juggle a very broad coalition as you say. He ended up hated by everyone because his way to handle it was not finding a middle ground, but campaigning as Mélenchon lite and then attempting to govern as Macron lite. Then he tried to dump the responsibility of the turnaround to financial markets and EU. After this, any possibility of a center-left coalition with an actual center-left agenda was dead and buried...
I think the historical socialist party (PS) is in many ways closer to Mélenchon than to Macron. Don’t forget there were actual communists in Mitterrand’s coalition ! I agree on Hollande’s hesitations, but it was that Mélenchon’s lite campaign that brought him to power—and his Macron lite policy was the catalyst to the PS demise as their electors switched en masse to Mélenchon.